Google Announces Project Tango, Mobile Platform That Allows Devices to Sense the World Around Us

Google is one of those companies that is continuously looking into the future and trying to predict what users will want next. It’s the bright minds in Mountain View that continuously surprise us with projects like Google Glass, self-driving cars, and Project Loon. Project Tango is the latest experiment announced by Google, showing just how ambitious Google can be when they get behind a new project. Project Tango might look like a bulky Android device, but as you see in the video below, it looks to do so much more than just be big.

To put it simply, Project Tango is seeking to put together a set of device components and algorithms that give mobile devices more awareness of their surroundings. Johnny Lee, lead of Project Tango, said “our devices today assume that our world ends at the edges of the screen,” and he wants to change that.

In their video released today, Project Tango is shown as a mobile device (running Android, of course) hooked up with a 4MP camera that works alongside a host of other sensors – such as a motion-tracking camera and depth sensors. It’s a lot of technology packed into that small white phone.

A few of the experiments Google shows off in its intro video is the ability to 3D map a phone’s environment, and then to place a virtual game level in that environment. It’s kind of like the games they created for Glass, but on super-sized steroids. They also showcase its ability to help people with visual impairments, as the phone makes over a quarter of a million 3D measurements every single second, then displays those measurements in real time for people to view.

As with most of their projects, Google has put the pieces of this project together, but is opening it up to software developers to figure out what to do with it. Project Tango is lining up developer units for people to put their minds together about what it would mean for a device to be able to track where it is in this world.

What kind of creation would you make with Project Tango in your hands?